Sirens (3 page)

“Done for now, Billy-boy, but if Mr. Connor suspects you’re hiding—”

“Nothing. I’m hiding nothing,” Pops interrupted. “My son has been dead and gone these past eleven months, and we have nothing.” They might not hear it, but I could: Pops’s voice shook.

“Mr. Connor says to tell you he’s paying you a visit in the near future. If he thinks you know something, our next pickup might not be the usual.”

“Yeah,” said another voice. “Liftin’ boxes is tough when your knees don’t work.”

Car doors slammed; a car motor started; the sound moved off. The back door shut with a thump and the lock clicked. Murmurings issued from my parents’ bedroom, and I lay there listening until I couldn’t hold my eyes open any longer.

Now as I reflected on that conversation it still made little sense. New York gangster Danny Connor was looking for something of Teddy’s, here in this house. Pops was sending me away as fast as he could, and had Ma talking about losing me. I didn’t know the specifics, but this was something so dangerous or so important that the threat to Pops, to Ma, and even to me was serious. And
then there was Teddy’s Houdini-like disappearance. He left us—he left me—for a reason.

I could see now that Pops wanted to get me out of the house for my own good.

If Teddy’s troubles were wrapped up with Connor, Pops’s line of work had put all of us in a devilish spot. Pops had been wrong to swallow his grief by working with the likes of Danny Connor.

I would never blame Teddy for this turn of events. No, I would not.

CHAPTER 3

Lou

So who knows right from wrong straightaway, anyhow?

I adjust my posture, folding my hands in my lap.

Look, Detective, I know what you’re trying here, but it ain’t working. That light is glaring straight into my baby blues, so would you mind? That’s better. Now, where were we? Oh, yeah. Me and Danny Connor. And right and wrong.

I never pretended to be sure about what was right. I never pretended to know anything but this: I did what I did to survive. Me, Louise O’Keefe, as tough as nails on the outside, but all I truly wanted was some guy to take care of me.

So sure, it was all about keeping us safe, at least at first. It was about me not having any more dough and us being down on our luck and Danny being in the right place at the right time. That he was from the old country? That was extra. I was pretty sure a boyo like him would
have a soft spot for the likes of me since we were both only a step away from home.

I hear the
clack
of the steno from behind my back as I talk.

I met Danny Connor back in 1921. When I saw him that day on the street, I was just about on my last dime. There he stood: handsomest guy I’d ever seen and oh so swanky in that three-piece and those spats, a cane with what I thought was a polished brass knob—I later learned it was solid gold. And his eyes, gray like a spring storm. Sure, he was the best-looking swell I’d ever seen. But that wasn’t what took me there. It was that other thing, that smell. Expensive aftershave, the kind you can buy only uptown in a shop where they know you by name. He reeked of it. That, and dough. Because money has a smell, too, you know?

And he was doling out the goods to the neighborhood: food, booze, money. Gave special attention to the elders and the littlest. I liked that.

I asked one of the boys, some jerk standing there, who the guy was and what he was about, and I learned he was a palooka who’d fought his way to the top. That he took care of his own around town. Every week he’d truck in stuff for the community. He was the biggest benefactor the Irish community had ever seen. Daniel Connor.

“So he’s decent,” I said, watching Danny work the crowd. I figured that he wasn’t born rich, and that he was trucking in liquid goods most of the time so as to make his dough, but by that time everyone and his mother was a rumrunner. “That’s pretty swell.”

“I’ll tell you what’s swell,” the jerk answered. Then he tried to put the squeeze on me, but I’d already set my sights higher, right straight to the top, to Danny, and I slugged that jerk smack on the kisser.

Detective Smith laughs out loud, and I smile. Back those four-plus years ago I was an eighteen-year-old with moxie. Enough moxie that I turned right around to Danny and stuck out my hand.

So I says to Danny, “Heyo. I’m Louise O’Keefe. My parents came from County Cork, but they’re now both dead and gone, and I’m looking for a job.”

Yeah, Danny laughed at first, but I could see it in his eyes when he looked me up and down. I might be short, but I’ve got curves in all the right places, or so I’ve been told.

“What did you have in mind?” Danny asked.

I stiffened my shoulders, folded my arms. “I can cook, clean, wash, iron. I can do it all.”

He looked me up and down again. This wasn’t anything new, but I was hopeful. Because one true guy was better than what I thought I was gonna have to put up with, being clean broke like I was.

“A girl like you doesn’t need to be ruining her pretty hands with that kind of work. Can you read and write?”

“Sure.”

“Can you learn to speak properly, and manage a household?”

I had no idea what he meant by that, but I said, “I’m willing to manage anything.”

When he smiled this time, he showed all his pearly whites.

A few weeks later he told me I was his dame, and that he’d take care of me. I took him at his word.

I watch that detective smirk now as I think again about right and wrong. That’s the only kind of right I knew back then, the kind I got from Danny. That he’d treat me right, yes, sir. As right as rain.

CHAPTER 4

MAY 18–19, 1925

Moll: noun, informal (also, “gun moll”): a gangster’s female companion.

—
Oxford Dictionary of the English Language

Jo

The dream of fire, of flames, of heat—my recurring nightmare—that’s what woke me, that terrible consuming desire of fire reaching for me that woke me this night or that out of a sound sleep so that I lay panting in the dark. Fire and being trapped in the fire in that small playhouse and the smother of smoke and snap of the wood around me: those were the memories that fed the nightmare that woke me. And made the scar on my back tingle with remembered pain.

And then any number of other things would keep me lying there, awake, in the dark.

This night, after the nightmare, what kept me awake was the obvious lie about sending me to New York City to find a suitable husband, and what was going on that had Pops and Ma so worried about me being safe.

I
got up and turned on the light. Sleep had left me; I might as well put my time in these wee hours to some use. I had to pack for New York. For Pops’s magic trick: making me disappear.

I’d likely never return to White Plains High. Not say good-bye to Moira, even if we had so little in common anymore with her eyeing the senior boys all the time, looking for a catch. No one else would miss me; within a couple of months kids would be scratching their heads trying to remember the name of the girl who read and wrote every spare minute, that quiet girl who disappeared like the mist that made up her dreams. Only my teacher, Miss Draper, who encouraged my writing, would worry over my absence.

Since from what Ma had said I didn’t need many clothes, I filled my suitcase with books. All my novels—the old ones by Austen, the newer ones by Eleanor Porter and Zane Grey, and the latest by Forster and Fitzgerald—they’d come with me. And I slipped in as many as I could of those masterful stories about clever Mr. Holmes, the ones Teddy’d given me. I’d carry the suitcase myself, even if it weighed a ton.

“It isn’t fair,” I whispered to the air in my room. “You were the hero, but I have to obey his orders.”

Life isn’t fair, Josie, I would’ve heard Teddy say. You’ve got to make what you make for yourself. Watch yourself, Josie-girl, because life can be downright dangerous.

As I looked at the last bundle to add to my suitcase, I wondered if Ma would notice that the things that had sat on Teddy’s dresser for the past year had gone missing.

I doubted it. Ma suffered in silence. She was too knotted up with her ongoing grief over Teddy to want to spend time in his room. I was the one who’d set up and maintained the little shrine,
who’d spent nights in the dark, staring at the boxes, at the medals, those shiny, shiny medals, that reflected what little light came in from the streetlights, the moon, the stars.

I lay the contents of that little shrine on top of the silk scarf, the one with the red poppies, the heavy silk square spread out flat. I rubbed the silk between my thumb and forefinger.

Teddy had brought that scarf for me when he came home from the war.

Like he’d promised before he left, that day in the early summer of ’17. He already had his uniform. His hair was still curling over his ears, blond and thick like sheep’s wool. He still flashed that beautiful smile, the one that made all the girls melt and made Ma and Pops proud—and made me proud, too, because I knew Teddy had a smile just for me.

“I’m gonna bring you something back from France, Josie-girl,” Teddy said. “Something real special that a body can’t find except only in Paris.”

“What?” I asked, excited, bouncing a little, not understanding what it meant for him to go to Paris then. “What, Teddy?”

“Oh, it’ll be a big surprise,” Teddy had said, and winked.

And when he came back only half a year later and handed me the fancy box with the scarf, I still didn’t understand. His hair had become short and stiff, and his back and his eyes had turned stiff, too.

“Like I promised” was all Teddy said as I opened the box and unfolded the scarf and draped it over my shoulders.

I stroked it and thanked Teddy, but he turned away and disappeared into his room before I could tell him how happy I was that he was home, how much I had missed him, how many new
secrets I had to share with him, how many new words I’d written during that half year he was gone….

I never really got Teddy back from that war. Not really. And all I had now was this scarf and the precious things that lay atop it.

I touched them one by one. The medals in their hinged boxes. One, two, three of them, those medals, all points and hard edges and high-sounding words.

“Keep these for me, Josie-girl,” Teddy’d said when he left almost a year ago. “I’ve got to go away for a while. Got to lay low.”

Then he’d asked me to cover for him. That business that still gave me a chill.

“It should only be for a time,” he’d said. “Then I’ll be back.”

“Why wouldn’t you be back?” I’d asked. “You will, won’t you?”

Teddy had chewed his lip, not looking at me. “This is a secret you’ve got to keep. Not tell Ma, not tell Pops. It’s life and death.”

I began to tremble. “How can I keep this from Ma and Pops?”

He took both my hands. “You can’t let on to anybody. Not anybody. Especially not Ma and Pops. You’ve got to pretend. Swear it, Jo.”

I tasted a bitter tang; the misery we would put our parents through was gall. But I swore, and now it was almost a year, and I had to believe that any day now Teddy would come back and everything would be all right again.

I put the medals back on the scarf and folded it over them and tied the corners into a tight knot and tucked the bundle deep in my suitcase under the books so that even the red poppies disappeared beneath the weight of leather and parchment.

Yes, Teddy was right. Life can be downright dangerous.

Pops came into the kitchen while I was eating breakfast. Worry worked at his mouth. “I got a telephone call. It’s best if Jo stays up in her room until I can get her to the train.”

Ma and I exchanged a quick look. She nodded at me, and I rested my fork on my plate.

I rose and started to my room, but a slight cough by the front door stopped me. The door was open to let in the spring air, the screen door keeping out the flies. A man stood on the other side of the screen.

Our eyes met, and he held mine like he was a hypnotist. I’d seen him in the flesh only once before, but I knew who he was. His picture was in the paper often enough. Mr. Daniel Connor. Boss man of the East Side, heir to the throne left vacant when Big Al Capone went to Chicago. Boss of my pops now, too.

Without turning away, I said, “Pops?”

Connor’s eyes were gray, the color of steel. He was young for someone with such power, maybe not even thirty. His eyes held mine, and something twisted inside me. I was alone on a steel-gray sea, and he was reeling me in, much against my inclination. He was a devil of a man

My heart slowed, and then time slowed. His lips formed a small smile that vanished in an instant. I didn’t like him. But he had my attention.

Pops came in behind me. “Go to your room, Josephine.” As I turned away Danny Connor tipped his hat.

I left the door of my room ajar and leaned against the wall next to the jamb. Daniel Connor had a soft, pleasant voice for someone built so square. I supposed he didn’t need to use his voice when, from what I’d read in the paper, his fists could do the job. Though
he looked like he hadn’t hit anyone himself in a while—his tailored suit, spats, felt hat, and gold-tipped cane were not fighting gear. No, he had men around him, like the men from the other night, who were not such sharp dressers and who looked like they could break a guy’s arm as if they were snapping a chicken’s neck.